After being unable to update my blog with blogger for ~4 months, which errors like:

[sshd] Did not receive identification string from x.x.x.x

I finally sat down and decided to move to functional blogging software. Unfortunately, the software I decided on, Movable Type, doesn’t have a handy autoimport from Blogger feature nor does Blogger have an export format. To covert a blog from Blogger to Movable means setting up your own custom templates and turing on on Blogger’s “archive” feature. Well that doesn’t sound to bad but you have to actual be able to republish your blog for this to work!!!

One way or the other, I needed to figure out how to make Blogger work with SFTP again (and by again, I truely mean again; over the last year Blogger has started and stopped working with sftp several times). The Blogger forums and FAQ were no help but I finally found this blog post: Fixing Blogger SFTP errors. Which explains that it’s merely just a problem with sshd rejecting plaintext passwords (note to Google: WTF guys? Can’t you implement a rational version of ssh?). The fix is to set this option in sshd_config:

PasswordAuthentication yes

At some point in the near future I’m am still going to dump Blogger. There are people screaming all over Google’s support forums about this issue and there has been absolutely no response from the support staff. Apparently “Blogger” is unsupported software. There is a wonderful presentation on how to move a blog to Movable Type here: b2mt.